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"What in the hell do you mean disappeared?" Jim Renosky's panicky
voice demanded.
I'd just rushed out of my near-north-side, Chicago
office, heading for the John Hancock Building. I needed to search the condo
of my missing best friend and psychiatrist partner, Sam Renosky. His disappearance
had become more unsettling in the last few minutes because of new information
that I'd acquired. Before leaving the office I'd called Sam's brother
Jim to see if he had any idea of Sam's whereabouts. When I got his voice
mail, I left a hurried message for him to call me and bolted out of the
office. As I reached
the corner of Walton Place and Michigan Avenue my cell phone chirped.
I answered and Dr. Jim Renosky
blithely asked, "Hey Bob, what's going on?"
I took a deep breath and said,
"Have you talked to Sam in the last couple of days?" I tried
to keep my voice steady, but even I could hear the edgy stress.
"Not since last week,"
he said and paused for a beat before continuing, "What's going on?
You sound strange."
When I broke the news about
his brother, Jim's reaction to the word disappearance was so powerful
that it forced me to stop dead in my tracks in the middle of the sidewalk.
It took several seconds to catch my breath. A brisk, moisture-laden wind
had started blowing in off Lake Michigan and the roaring sound it carried
made it difficult to hear. I hated breaking this to him, standing here
on the street, but I had no other choice. It would take another five or
ten minutes to get to Sam's condo, and even then there was no way of knowing
if the news would be any better.
Sam and I had dinner
last Thursday night just before his scheduled flight to Washington,"
I explained. "He was going to attend a three-day symposium, and then
come back yesterday morning in time for an afternoon appointment. He never
showed up. I called him at home last night, but no one answered. I left
messages on his machine and on his cell phone, but got no response. When
I contacted O'Hare this morning they told me that it was a real mess out
East because of the hurricane. Lots of flights had been canceled or delayed."
Before I could go on, Jim anxiously
cut in, "Hold it, Bob. Sam couldn't have just disappeared off the
face of the earth. Have you checked with the symposium people?"
"I talked with them a
little while ago and they said that Sam never showed up for the conference.
This means Sam has been missing for five days instead of just two."
I paused to wait for a response,
but all I heard was Jim's rapid breathing. After some moments he let out
an unintelligible mumbled expletive.
Without waiting for more, I
said, "I'm on my way to Sam's condo right now to check things out.
He keeps an extra key at the office."
As if he hadn't even heard
me, Jim tentatively asked, "Do you, ah, do you think he might have
taken his new girlfriend with him? Damn, I can't even think of her name
right now." He paused again, and then to someone in the background
I heard Jim say, "Can't do the next procedure, I've got a problem."
Jim, a well-known surgeon must
have been in between procedures. The voice I'd heard in the background
had to be someone on his surgical team.
I gave him a few seconds before
going on. "He said nothing at dinner about taking Vicki, but I wouldn't
put it past him to dump the symposium and fly out to the Bahamas with
her. He would normally tell me of such a plan though, especially if he
was going to be late getting back. He doesn't miss patient appointments."
I heard empty air on the other
end of the phone for several seconds before Jim finally said, "Have
you got Vicki's number?"
"No, but when I get to
Sam's I'll look for it. You said you talked to him a week or so ago? Did
he say anything at all that might explain his disappearance?"
"Not a word," Jim
said, panic continuing to build in his voice. "I called him last
Monday and we made a golf date for next weekend. He didn't mention the
Washington trip, but you know Sam, the absentminded professor."
"Yeah, I know," I
mumbled as I ducked into the doorway of an expensive Michigan Avenue boutique
to avoid the drizzle that had just started blowing in off a dark Lake
Michigan.
Like many in his profession,
Jim was usually very self-contained and controlled. His personality was
in stark contrast to his easy-going, comic-to-the-core psychiatrist brother.
Hearing him exhibit this kind of emotion certainly didn't match my picture
of him. On the other hand, I only knew him as Sam's older brother. Jim
and Sam had a complicated sibling relationship. I'd seen their competitiveness,
personality differences, and Jim's somewhat condescending attitude at
times. They didn't see a lot of one another, but you could tell that in
spite of all that, they loved one another. Jim sometimes acted like a
surrogate father with Sam, which was probably only natural. Their parents
had been killed in a plane crash when Sam was a teenager, and Jim took
over the rearing chores of his precocious adolescent brother.
As I waited for Jim to speak,
cold rain penetrated my jacket and sent a shiver up my spine. It wasn't
just the chill of the moisture, but an impending sense of fear that caused
me to quake.
Hearing no more activity in
the background, I decided that Jim must have moved to somewhere more private.
He finally came back sounding as if he'd decided on his own theory of
Sam's disappearance.
"I bet he got mugged in
Washington, and is either in a hospital or a John Doe in the morgue."
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